


Convergence

by ignitesthestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Slow Build, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 22:46:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5803270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They begin in the same place. Despite all odds, they keep coming back together. A series of meetings, between light and dark, and whatever lies in the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

Ben - _Kylo_ \- stands over the body, chest heaving. Sweat beads on his forehead, slips down his neck, settles at the small of his back. His robes are too heavy, and too bright. Overhead, the sun glares down at him, the only witness to his crime. To his revelation.

There is a corpse at his feet where there had once been a person, and it was easy.

_These are your first steps_ , the voice of his mentor - his _true_ mentor - whispers. _You have made me proud, Kylo Ren. Now impress me._

“Ben?” A voice - young, male - from the door. They’re stacked like clones in the dormitories, nothing to differentiate them. No clear indication of power, of the unique abilities they possess amongst the billions of lifeforms in the galaxy. The abilities that they are _squandering_. “Is that--?”

A lightsaber? A body? The name of some useless Jedi that Kylo Ren can’t even remember anymore?

( _R,_ some soft and weak part of him says. _It starts with R and you know her, and you like her, and you are going to hate yourself forever for this._

_Good_ , the strong part of him says in return)

The newcomer never gets the chance to ask. Kylo throws out an arm and _twists_ , shoving the Force into the shape he wants. A startled cry escapes the boy’s mouth as he’s dragged across the courtyard, and then there is only silence, and two corpses where once there had been people.

The cry has drawn attention. Kylo had intended to start off slower, to do this smartly - pick them off one by one, a hunter stalking prey. But people are entering the courtyard now, other students, and there’s no hiding his lightsaber and the bodies and the strength of the Dark Side welcoming him home.

“Ben?”

“ _Ben!_ ”

Something hot and ugly and powerful thrashes in his gut. Anger is of the Dark Side, and Kylo Ren lets it rip through him. “That’s not _my name!_ ” he hisses, spittle flying as he hefts his lightsaber, the weapon bucking in his grip.

That’s when the screaming starts. There’s no picking them off now, and a frisson of fear feeds his strength as he carves his way through Luke Skywalker’s pathetic attempt at a school. He had a plan - but it’s so hard to think straight with so many people, with the Force agitating around him, with each gap torn in it as he swings his blade.

None of the others have lightsabers yet.

_They are not worthy_ , his mentor assures him. _If they were, they would kill you. Such is the way of true power._

He is true power. He can feel it, the slice and burn of it searing into his very veins. _This_ is what Luke Skywalker has been keeping from him. _This_ is what Luke Skywalker, weak and selfish and short-sighted, will never know.

Kylo Ren will have to show him.

There are other voices now - not outside, but within, scrabbling at the edges of his awareness. Anguish strikes at him as surely as he strikes at some nothing ten year old, and this is--

This--

_Ben, you don’t have to do this. Ben, it’ll be okay. Ben, come back. Come back to me. I love you. Ben._

The Force batters him, a child with a screwed up face and terror written in every inch of her. Ben - _Kylo_ staggers, and for a brief second hope lights the girl up, a desperate and hideous thing.

He chokes her.

_You should have thought of that before you sent me away_ , he snarls at Leia Organa, because he knows that will hurt her, knows that the words will dig in and fester and that a part of him will stay with her no matter where he goes now.

The other voice is his uncle. He has nothing to say to him. Shutting out these voices is one of the first things his mentor had taught him, and he makes full use of that skill now. He has a purpose. Distractions are not to be born.

They’re starting to run, now, the others. He doesn’t hurry. There is nowhere they can run that he will not find them. He drags his lightsaber along the walls, mesmerised by the sparks and the sound. It’s not a perfect weapon - he will improve it later - but he can hear the fast rising sobs of another weakling, and knows it for an effective one.

It’s not just his own fear and anger that he feeds off. It’s theirs, a dozen wounds in the Force running into each other, slicing into something larger, something infinite. The echo of that ricochets through him; he loses his footing, slams into the wall, shoves himself off again. 

His hair falls in his eyes. He remembers his mother pushing it back, a thousand motions over a lifetime. He straightens, and kills another youngling.

Slowly, the sounds of reality fade. Screaming to sobs, sobs to silence. The Force shrieks around him, but that’s a quiet thing as well. He is the only one left to hear it.

“I have hurt you,” he says to the air. In an X-wing, in hyperspace, in a place too far away to stop Kylo Ren, he feels Luke Skywalker recoil. “I have hurt you, and I am _untouchable_.”

There is only a void to respond to him. He drinks it in, the sound of his footsteps and the crackles of his lightsaber echoing through the halls. He is the eye of the storm, and he is

not

alone…

He is back in the courtyard. The sun is still glaring, and his robes are still bright. He had expected more blood, but lightsabers cauterise. Sweat soaks the back, under his arms, but he remains a figure in beige.

He can’t count how many corpses there are now, that had once been people. They are strewn haphazardly, in bits and pieces. Isn’t it a Jedi rite of passage, losing a limb?

Kylo laughs. And on the edge of it all, a small figure jerks, her head flying up. Three ponytails bob with the motion. In her hands pools a wreath of daisies, fingers laced carefully to avoid crushing them.

For a moment, they just stare at each other.

“It hurts,” she says finally. There’s no pain in her voice, though. Only bewilderment.

He brings his lightsaber up. “It’s supposed to.”

There is a wound in the Force and it will echo here for eons, but there is a wound in her too. He strides towards her. Her face is dirt-and-grass-stained, streaked with tears and nothing resembling comprehension. He stands over her, poised to finish his work. Her fingers clench, crushing one of the flowers.

“Oh, no,” she whispers. “Oh no. It’s broken.”

And she sits on the ground, crossing her legs instinctively. A body - the first body - stares at her incredulously, as she carefully picks out the ruined flower and winds the others back together, clumsily recreating the wreath.

Ben - Kylo stares as well. He waits for her to look up. Waits for her to start screaming. Waits for her to lash out with the Force, to do _anything_ that isn’t simply sitting there. He waits until it becomes apparent that there is no sense in waiting at all, because she’s not going to do any of that.

_It’s broken_.

Silently, he thumbs off his lightsaber. He reaches out to his mentor - his master - for counsel, only to find another void. Panic rises in his chest, and then subsides. So his his walls had kept out more voices than intended. That’s fine. Suitable, even. He has not been abandoned.

He turns his back on the girl. There’s a shuttle due to pick him up at any moment.

It will hurt them worse, he thinks. To leave her here.


	2. Chapter 2

There is something wrong with Jakku.

It’s not the dessicated husks of Star Destroyers. The old Empire had been bloated, weak. It couldn’t learn from its own mistakes. It had fallen, and the First Order rose from the ashes.

Such is the way of things.

It’s not the failure of Hux’s men to retrieve the droid, and the map that it contains. Frustration ties a tight knot in the pit of his stomach, but Jakku still hovers on the edge of Kylo Ren’s awareness, separate and distinct. The Stormtroopers will find the droid, or they - and anyone else associated - will suffer the consequences.

It’s not the memory of an old man. Of his lightsaber’s drag, of the rend and tear of plasma through flesh and bone. Of a corpse, where once there had been a person.

That could have happened anywhere. Jakku is not special, for the end of one miserable life.

It isn’t special at all. It’s _wrong_ , an aberration in the Force itself. The thought occurs to him - briefly - that it might be a person rather than a thing. He discards the thought almost immediately. Luke Skywalker would never endanger even the pathetic settlers on Jakku by retreating there, and there are no signs to indicate any other kind of Jedi presence, historical or otherwise.

The planet might as well be a void in the Force, for all its use.

A smear of slowly approaching terror distracts him. The frustration boiling under his skin rises, threatening to explode. They are always afraid. The terror comes when they know they have failed.

To be so close, only to have it slip through his fingers...Kylo gives the man his back, because officers are hard to come by, and he's curious to see how this one will try to salvage the situation. They often lie.

This one doesn't. The honesty digs fingers into his skin, little hooks sinking into flesh. He had _known_ the troopers were useless, known that the sort of man his - _General Organa_ \- would send on this mission would have a knack for defying the odds.

Known that the sort of man to betray the First Order _and_ escape, _with_ a high level prisoner would not be so easily caught. His lightsaber is in his hand before he can finish pinpointing the exact source of his rage; the console seems as good a place to excise it as any.

Behind him, the officer cowers. _Weak_ , he rages. _Weak and pathetic and useless excuse for a_ \--

And still, in the back of his mind, Jakku. He stops and he breathes, and hates the stillness for reminding him of everything that is still in motion.

Under the rush of air filtering through his mask, the word girl collides with the wrongness of Jakku. The roar of blood in his ears is deafening; he doesn't plan, doesn't think, doesn't do anything beyond react. The Force bends to his will. The officer chokes in his grasp.

“What. Girl.”

* * *

“My boy.” A slash of a smile opens the Supreme Leader's face. It is the first time Kylo Ren has seen it. His first numb thought is that the features suit the voice.. “You have surpassed my expectations.”

B - Kylo has always been tall, matching his - Han Solo at fifteen. Snoke towers over him, a ghost swathed in black. He holds his arms out in welcome, and Kylo feels the wash of acceptance roll over him

He belongs. It is instinct to kneel, to show his gratitude. The clawing void inside him abates. He is…

where he is meant to be.

“Rise, Master of the Knights of Ren.” Snoke tucks his gnarled hands behind his back as Kylo does so. The two of them fall into step, and he is an _equal_ as he always _should have been._ “Tell me: how does it feel to shoulder your grandfather’s legacy? This is not the first time a Jedi Order has been slaughtered, after all.”

Kylo is sure his mentor - master - does not mean it as a rebuke. And yet, his pride is pricked anyway. He has not done - all that he has done, only to repeat the victories of the past. He will carry on Darth Vader’s legacy. He will see it to its inevitable conclusion, with the guidance of Supreme Leader Snoke.

“There is more to be done,” he says slowly, glancing sidelong. “This was only the first step. I feel...incomplete.”

Snoke inclines his head. He remains facing forward, on the path ahead. Kylo Ren can’t help but steal another glance sideways. The word shudders an odd anxiety through him. He had not been given orders - he will _give_ orders now - but there were certain expectations that had been passed along to him when his master whispered in the back of his mind.

_Show me that you can destroy them all._

“The urge to strive for more is what separates us from men like Luke Skywalker. He could have ruled the galaxy, and now look at him. A broken man, leader of a school of corpses.”

_-_

_a wreath of daisies, wilted in the heat_

_-_

_a small hand, stretching up_

_-_

_a corpse, that had once been a person_

_-_

_“It’s you!”_

_-_

_a gappy smile, a flash of brown eyes_

_-_

_“I made this for you.”_

_-_

_Luke Skywalker, an ocean of agony and regret, crouching_

_-_

_“Thank you, R--”_

-

“It was easier than I thought,” Kylo Ren gasps, thrusting the vision away. “I expected turmoil. Something more, to draw my power from.”

Snoke chuckles, one hand patting his shoulder. “Do not trouble yourself, my student. The greatest pain, and the greatest power, is that which comes with time. The galaxy will know to cower and run upon hearing the name Kylo Ren one day.”

He sneers, turning his mind carefully away from wide brown eyes. “They should do that now. I have bested their precious hero. I have redeemed the name Skywalker.”

“Have you.”

His mouth is open to assure the Supreme Leader when he catches the tone. There is danger laced through every genial syllable, and it occurs to Kylo Ren that the details of his vision might not be as private as he had initially assumed.

_I never received orders--_

_Supreme Leader had expectations._

I _have expectations. I am Master of the Knights of Ren_

_**Are you.** _

His fingers curl into a fist. He sucks in a slow breath, before realising that is a Jedi technique. The yell escapes him before he can stop it, and the _snap-hiss-crackle_ of his lightsaber igniting happens before he realises he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t _have_ to.

Furniture gives way to his fury. After a moment or two, so do the walls. Snoke watches on impassively and in the middle of it all, Kylo Ren builds a wall of his own.

* * *

_“It hurts,” she says finally. There’s no pain in her voice, though. Only bewilderment._

_He brings his lightsaber up. “It’s supposed to.”_

_He brings his lightsaber down. The last body falls, a corpse that was a five year old girl._

_Kylo Ren kicks it with his foot as he leaves. It rolls onto the daisies, crushing them._


	3. Chapter 3

Rey can feel the weight of him in her skull.

It’s a thick, alien thing. It presses down on her, not searching so much as trying to crush the information out of her. And it works. Memories slip out from her edges, the place where he has overwhelmed her.

He takes them. There is a voice in her ear, terrible in its softness, but the sound is incidental. The words bury through bone, little fingers digging into her brain until she isn’t sure who they belong to.

 _Get out get out get out_. A tear slips down her cheek, ignored by both of them. _Get out get out GET OUT._

He pauses.

It’s a little thing, barely a stutter in the inexorable encroach of _him_ into _them_. But Rey has made a life out of little things, of grasping onto chances that others would consider risks and impossibilities.

He pushes again. She grits her teeth, and shoves back.

It’s easier than she expected. Her mind still screams – her whole _body_ screams, the lines of tension in her stretched near to snapping – but there’s a purpose to it. Movement, a motion. When she shoves, he moves back.

( _Like a dance—_ )

How long has it been since someone defied him? Rey has always hated bullies, has spent most of her life being unable to do anything about it. People with power have been lording it over her since she was a child, and she is _tired_. Tired of patience, of putting up with it, of waiting for someone else to come back for her.

No one is coming for her now. Finn left, she sent BB-8 away, Han doesn’t want to get involved, and there is no one else. Maybe this creature – _Kylo Ren_ , the thought brushes across the place where their minds meet – is right. She’s lonely, she’s alone, but _she’s_ here.

It’s going to have to be enough.

(He’s here as well. And it occurs to her that if he can be in her mind, she can be in his)

It’s not enough to escape. She wants to take something from him in kind, because he has seen the void in her, and there must be one in him that he recognised it. Rey has always learnt by doing, so she doesn’t think about the risks or impossibilities now. She thinks that this is a man powerful in the Force, and she has made him stumble.

If she made him stumble, she can make him fall.

Rey is a scavenger. She knows the value of taking something and making it better. This creature – this _Kylo Ren­_ presses back hard, and she thinks _oh_.

 _This is how you do it_.

Except why crush everything, when you can push on a single weak spot and achieve the same results? Rey makes a shovel of herself and digs and digs and digs. She hits the fear first, the confusion as he realises he’s put too much into his attack, saved nothing for defence

“You’re afraid,” she says. Triumph roars through her. There is a specific thing he had kept for himself, and it belongs to her now as well.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what he’s afraid of.

Only that he is.

* * *

Rey has hated before.

Always in flashes. Moments, directed at Unkar Plutt, and other scavengers. Herself. But she has never seen the point in sustaining it.

It has never had the power to mean anything before. Years toiling under the relentless sun on Jakku and it’s here, in the dark and in the cold a million miles from everything she has ever known, that Rey learns the strength of hatred

 _I can show you the ways of the Force_.

She can feel Kylo Ren’s breath on her face, his power in the air. It’s freezing, but heat rolls off the both of them. _The Force._ Her lips shape the word, and her will shapes the very fabric of the universe. She has watched Kylo Ren, the way pain draws the power out of him, pushes him onward. And hate has never hurt so much as it does in this moment, with Han Solo dead and Finn hurt and the proof of her own weakness bending her backwards over a chasm in the earth.

It would be so easy, she thinks. To tear herself open, to wreck herself and him with it. Rey closes her eyes, breathes, reaches—

_And then what?_

If it’s a voice, it’s only her own. But not the panicked, desperate thinking of a girl on the edge. The Force swirls around her, threading in and out of every living thing – the snow, the trees, herself, Kylo Ren. She can _see_ how to focus it, to take her pain and her anger and her hate and forge it into the same power he has. It wouldn’t take more than a moment.

**_And then what?_ **

Kylo Ren will die. And she will still have all of that terrible focus, and nowhere to put it.

Rey is a scavenger. She knows the value of taking something, and making it better. She breathes deep again, takes in Kylo Ren – and the snow, and the trees, and herself.

Her eyes open. The hatred is there, but she doesn’t forge her focus from it.

When she fights, she fights with everything.

* * *

_You need a teacher!_

Rey wonders if he knows how much she has learnt from him already.

She wonders what it makes her, that she’s glad for it.


	4. Chapter 4

Rey dreams of Kylo Ren.

Not masked and cloaked, a nightmare that she doesn't think anyone would begrudge her. Not calm and impassive, looming at her from out of the shadows. Sometimes, he doesn't even seem to notice that she's there. It's a strange experience, not being the focal point of your own dream.

No, this is Kylo Ren stripped bare. She sees him strapped to a bed while a med-droid works on him, the cords in his neck stretched to snapping as they patch him like an old quilt. One spindly metal limb moves towards the wound bisecting his face, red and raw.

It looks like she feels, in some quiet raging corner of her soul.The Force twists, and he tears the droid apart.

Rey dreams that his rehabilitation is a slow, agonising thing. She’s projecting - she must be. The First Order had state of the art technology, more than enough to deal with wounds like Kylo Ren’s. This weeks-long process has to be a product of her own mind, the darker side that had wanted to do more than just mark up his face a bit.

...a lot. That’s in her dreams as well, the wide knot of scarring twisting up his face, terminating over the bridge of his nose.

 _Good_ , she thinks, with a savageness that startles her. Maybe scares her, a bit

In her dreams, Kylo Ren knows. And it hurts, moving his face, but he makes a mockery of a smile anyway.

* * *

Her mind is...new.

And she’s the enemy. It’s not hard to convince himself that he seeks her out for a usable reason. Any intel on this new Jedi who has spent a lifetime avoiding the Supreme Leader’s grasp, who had managed to overwhelm him - even in an injured state - was information he needed to have.

For the First Order, and Supreme Leader Snoke. Obviously.

Her thoughts linger over his injuries like they mean something, like they’re more than mere fuel to push him to greater heights of power. Something squirms in her and he thinks of bared teeth and harsh breathing. Of her own power, untried and untested, scrabbling at the edge of the Dark before the ground had torn open between them and the Light swallowed her.

She is with Luke Skywalker. And he smiles, because this little scavenger comes with an edge that even his uncle - in all his _wisdom_ \- won’t be able to sand off.

(He smiles, because there is an ugly thing inside of her, and it writhes in his gut as well)

* * *

It is, Rey thinks, unreasonable to think that Luke knows everything in the world. It’s even unreasonable to think that he knows everything about _her_. And yet. When he catches her staring into her polystarch over breakfast, there’s something in the way he sighs that makes her feel like he’s just reached into her soul.

It’s not the only thing that’s been making her feel that way, lately.

“Something’s troubling you,” he says, and the tone in his voice is enough to make her heart break. It reminds her of Han offering her a job, of Finn coming back for her, of Leia hugging her before they even knew each other’s names.

Maz Kanata's rough voice rasps over her, reminding her about the people she'd lost (never had?) and the people who were hers. She tugs at the edges of the polystarch, ripping it into crumbs, rolling the crumbs into chunks again because instinct reminds her not to waste food.

"What if I'm not good enough?" she blurts. "To be a Jedi?"

Something stirs, in the depths of her mind. Not a darkness (or a Darkness), but not something unlike it, either. It's a hurt thing, a raw thing that moves like it's healed over. Like pain is a part of it.

Luke sets his own breakfast aside. The pale blue of his eyes make him look like someone younger, most of the time. But right now he wears the face of the man she had first met after Starkiller, with the weight of all his years and probably those of a few other people on top.

"There's more than one definition for the word good," he says slowly. "I'm guessing you're not talking about skill."

Rey feels herself gripped by a terrible curiosity. It stills her breath for a moment, traps it in her throat because it doesn’t belong to her.

 _Why?_ it whispers

“How do you…” She clears her throat, forcing herself to focus. “How do you move past wanting someone to _hurt_ for everything they’re done?”

_You don’t. You use it. You take the anger and the pain and you forge it into its own weapon._

_You hurt. You are hurt. There’s power in that._

Luke’s mouth is moving, but Rey misses what he says. She sets her polystarch to one side, head hanging over her knees, knuckling her eyes like she can somehow drive the voice out that way. Her mind is a mess of sounds and emotion, and she thinks - it’s so hard to think - that not all of it belongs to her.

A hand brushes her shoulder. Luke. And a surge of resentment rolls through her, so powerful she can taste the bitterness on her tongue. Something explodes - or maybe that’s just the crash of the sea, hurling itself against the rocks.

_a wreath of daisies, wilted in the heat_

_-_

_a small hand, stretching up_

_-_

_a corpse, that had once been a person_

_-_

_“It’s you!”_

* * *

The sparking remains of a console are the only source of light around him - the overheads had flickered out when his lightsaber had sliced through the power source. Hux is going to get that pinched look on his face again. Kylo Ren absently closes his fist, pulverising it.

He remembers the daisies.

Everything around them is a blur, the smell of seared meat, the choking elation, the thrash of the Force roiling inside him. But the daisies - a small, lopsided wreath, lying on the ground.

That’s his memory.

It has no business being in her mind.

Skywalker speaks, and Kylo Ren is of the opinion that _he_ has no business doing that, either. The man had failed as a teacher on every level. Failed to teach him, failed to teach the other students to defend against him.

 _He’s weak_ , he insists, pushing the words into her skull. He has never been able to affect someone’s mind over such distances, but there has been something different about this girl from the moment he met her. _You can do so. much. better._

Skywalker’s words come through, loud and clear.

“Start by asking why you want to hurt them.” The hand on her shoulder feels like a comfort to the girl, but it is a crushing weight for him, pushing him down. Holding him back. “Is it because of what they did? Or because of what you couldn’t do?”

He can’t know. There is no way - Kylo will admit that Skywalker has some power through the Force, misguided and misused as it is, but there is no way the man can know he is _there_. And yet the words slice into him anyway, tear him open in that way only certain people in the galaxy have ever been able to manage.

He reels back mentally, heaves himself out of her mind. But he can’t - there’s no escape route, no way of severing the connection. He thrashes, in his mind and in the Force, but _she_ is still there. Still wrapped around him, threaded through him.

Her mind lights up. He feels it, the previously passive presence suddenly seizing the rope of connection between them.

 _Oh_ , her mind whispers. _This is how you do it._


End file.
